Gaming technology bleeds into business

Columnists' corner: Think gaming technologies and the enterprise are mutually exclusive? You're not alone, but "game technology is bleeding into the conventional business world, points out editor in chief Steve Fox in Gaming for business. Take Second Life, for instance, where "the virtual-community-to-business-community crossover is largely theoretical." The same cannot be said of chips, though, as "core gaming technology is going mainstream" in the processor realm.

Open source: By embracing open standards, browser maker Opera has primed its offering for open source, but the company is not planning to actually open source its code. "The majority of Web surfers still use closed source browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is of course the leader, but even Apple's Safari, which is built around an open source core, contains proprietary components," explains Neil McAllister in this week's installment of Open Enterprise."If Opera gives away the secrets of its advantage by opening its source code, what revenue model is left for it?"

Screencasts: Accompanying our Test Center review BizTalk 2006 deftly connects enterprise apps is this demonstration of the product that incldues a look at Microsoft'd design goals for BizTalk, the functions it can perform for different roles in an enterprise, and the visibility it brings into IT infrastructure. Watch the screencast here.